Who’s Really Helping Nepal?

By Pavel Tuchinsky

Who’s Really Helping Nepal?

The Nepal earthquake occurred nearly a month ago, and the country is still struggling to recover. The massive earthquake and subsequent aftershocks took over 8,000 lives and twice as many were injured.

Since the disaster, donations began pouring in. But who’s really helping Nepal? We took a look at the top aid organizations funneling donations into the stricken country to see who’s doling out the dough to help Nepal recover from this disaster.

Unsurprisingly, several relief organizations illustrated a sharp increase in website traffic shortly after the first earthquake hit. But how many of those users were actually visiting the donation page? It seems that the Redcross.org had the most total desktop traffic, with over 3 million visits in the past 28 days, but just .5% of those visits headed for the donation page. Meanwhile, a whopping 85% of visits to the Handicap International website made it to the donation page, an impressive feat even if total website traffic was much lower than that of their “competitors.”

One interesting data point we uncovered is that traffic was actually greater following the aftershock (shown here on both graphs as “Earthquake #2”), not the original earthquake. On May 12 Nepal suffered the largest aftershock from the earthquake, and renewed interest in the disaster is seen to spike on that date to the Action Aid website.

World-renown charitable organization UNICEF also experienced a sharp increase in site visits. The increase was comparable to the increase in traffic from the first earthquake.

One theory for the spike is that visitors were sympathetic after the first quake but not enough to take any action. The 2nd earthquake helped raise awareness once again, and might have helped drive more funds for disaster relief.

If that’s the case, perhaps that’s the only silver lining in all of this.